Single-sided natural ventilation in buildings: a critical literature review

Natural ventilation nowadays has been paid great concerns due to its zero carbon emission and good performance on the human health. In engineering applications, cross ventilation driven by winds has been frequently restricted in building clustered cities. Instead, single-sided natural ventilation becomes an alternative mode in wind driven natural ventilation strategies for clustered urban buildings. This research has reviewed the former published researches on single-sided natural ventilation in terms of the classification, features, influence factors, investigation methodologies and evaluation indices/parameters. Existing researches on a novel ventilation mechanism of single-sided natural ventilation—“pumping ventilation” have been comprehensively reviewed, which could be a promising ventilation strategy of single-sided natural ventilation. This critical review demonstrates that single-sided ventilation has raised increasing concerns of researchers. In current and future investigations, different methodologies and other advanced technologies should be coupled together to promote the predicting capability of single-sided ventilation. This review could facilitate the fundamental researches and engineering applications of natural ventilation in modern urban buildings.